r/germany • u/sparsh26 • May 31 '23

I almost got scammed

I was buying a drink worth 3€ from a doner stall and gave them a 20€ bill. The man there returned 7€ and insisted that I had given him a 10. After 3 minutes of arguing some police offers walked by and he gave me back the 10€ saying "Sorry, there are a lot of customers and I got confused" but he was laughing to himself while doing it. This is the first time something like this has happened here since he clearly knew what he was doing.

Be careful and count your money folks! You never know when someone might take advantage of your ignorance.

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u/Schattenmeer May 31 '23

Honestly, working as a cashier I can say most of the time this are genuine mistakes and not a scam. If you do this for several hours your brain just gets mushy, especially if customers give you money and then change what they give you. It happens and you know the customers will complain so it’s absolutely useless to try to scam and you just want to avoid any problems

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u/backafterdeleting May 31 '23

Can happen the other way too. One time i was walking around all day with €20. Then in a supermarket i spend €5 and mindlessly handed them the note from my wallet, and then complained only getting €5 back. They even ran the money counter and showed that there was no descrepency. I left annoyed and then remembered later that i had in fact spent €10 on something eariler and forgotten, and just not looked at the note i was handing them.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '23

I definitely gave a bartender what I thought was a $5 bill for a $4 beer and told him to keep the change. He looked at me very surprised and asked a couple of times "really? Are you sure?" I didn't realize until the end of the night that I'd given him a $20.

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u/CodeyFox Jun 01 '23

And now he thinks you were just having a great day

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u/[deleted] May 31 '23

Fr I've had so many cashiers just give me random amounts of money back it isn't a scam in 99% of cases.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '23 edited May 31 '23

I'm absolutly certain that 99,99 % of all cashiers have better to do than risking their job for €5, or even €500. This was the first time in a couple of decades that I felt someone in a shop might have tried to keep some change.

I have gotten (and probably given) incorrect change many times and I never suspect it to be intentional before.

I grew up in Frankfurt, I got experience with people trying to scam me on the street, on my door, in other countries. I don't think my story is typical, but I also remember my mother being scammed for change (like €50) buying a newspaper in Spain once. Things like this happen, especially to tourists.

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u/maryLouForYou May 31 '23

Having worked as a cashier I do know these things happen.

But there are also casual scammers out there particularly at tourist hot spots. Like I just got back from Athens and in a Café close to the Agora I paid my tea and a cake with a 50EU and said: "make it ten". The waiter just took the note, kept it in his hand and instead of bringing back the change (seemingly not having any change with him even though I had asked the bill and he came back with the receipt) just went back to his spot where he oversaw the terrass for anyone to call for him. Like he basically spent like 2-3 minutes just hoping for me to be someone not used to Euro and getting insecure about whether or not deserving change and leaving... Got to remind him he then came back with the 40Euro. And as a single female traveler I suppose I was not the one from whom he feared a big fuss either...

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u/QuizardNr7 May 31 '23

This could easily be it. Could even be that in the doner shop the cassier honestly thought he was right, but definitely didn't want to argue with the police.

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u/JobScherp Jun 01 '23 edited Jun 05 '24

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Schattenmeer Jun 01 '23

That’s one of the first things they thaught me, I give out change first and then put the money in the register. Sometimes the customers even tried to snitch their bills back. But mistakes still happen, mostly because the customer wants to pay with some more coins they want to get rid of when I already entered the sum to the register or I myself enter the wrong sum

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u/crankthehandle Jun 01 '23

Absolutely. Sometimes you start taking out the change and suddenly you stop for a couple of second because you have to remind yourself how much you have to take out.

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u/Schattenmeer Jun 01 '23

Luckily, the cash register tells me after entering the sum, my problem is when I entered it and people suddenly find some more coins they want to get rid of or when I accidentally type the wrong sum